Up until a week ago, here is something you could have learned from Wikipedia:
From 1640 to 1641 the might of colonial Portugal clashed with India’s massive Maratha Empire in an undeclared war that would later be known as the Bicholim Conflict. Named after the northern Indian region where most of the fighting took place, the conflict ended with a peace treaty that would later help cement Goa as an independent Indian state.
Except none of this ever actually happened. The Bicholim Conflict is a figment of a creative Wikipedian’s imagination. It’s a huge, laborious, 4,500 word hoax. And it fooled Wikipedia editors for more than 5 years.

Not only was it on Wikipedia, but it was labeled as a “Good Article” and nominated as a featured article, all until someone decided to check its sources, and discovered that the whole thing was a lie.

Sadly, this is not the only hoax on Wikipedia. Wikipedia itself lists seven hoaxes which had a longer shelf life than this article, including one about a fictitious rock band which died in a fictitious plane crash while in route to a fictitious concert hall, and an article about Japanese biological warfare experiments perpetrated in a non-existent city in China by a non-existent Japanese army group.

Call me an elitist, but this is the fruit of crowd sourcing. When your legions of fact checkers and editors are all amateurs and hacks, it is only normal that the result will be mediocre or just plain wrong. This is why publishers pay people to check things and get them right–and even then, mistakes still creep in.